


Breathe Water

by AlixanderFD



Series: The Flesh Not Seen [4]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Demons, Drowning, Flash Fiction, M/M, Macabre, Nightmares, Sleep Paralysis, Succubi & Incubi, Trauma, conceptual
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-02
Updated: 2020-03-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:21:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22983943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlixanderFD/pseuds/AlixanderFD
Summary: The feeding of nightmares.—‘They brought him from the river. Stone-deep, catfish-gleaming, chest full of sea, he came ashore in their arms and they pounded water from him. From the window I watched him coughing, and I tasted the ocean churning in his mouth, charging into mine.’
Series: The Flesh Not Seen [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1651750
Kudos: 1





	Breathe Water

They brought him from the river. Stone-deep, catfish-gleaming, chest full of sea, he came ashore in their arms and they pounded water from him. From the window I watched him coughing, and I tasted the ocean churning in his mouth, charging into mine.

I wanted to drown him. By god, I wanted to put him back in that water and make him swallow it all just so I could drink it from him. I felt so empty. I felt my hips where the bones pressed out and they crushed aching into my center. Guts to mouth, I was full with empty space, but I waited. Patiently by the bed, I waited to receive him.

They brought him in quick and wrapped him up in cotton so he could lie here, shaking uncontrollably. It wasn’t long before he slept, but my thirst split the seconds into hairs. As his breathing became deep and slow I sat astride his chest, absorbing its crests and falls with burning heat beneath me, moving me by my core, his wracked body heaving fruitlessly to spill me. I leaned down and drank from him. His foaming tongue, his palate of salt, a throat pulsating and constricting like the sea herself, I tasted them all. I loved him for seconds, and then he was out of bed, shaking on the floor like a nest of rats in the moonlight. They put him back in the sheets, but from then until the dawn he sat upright, staring straight forward in the dark as though he could sense me there, waiting.

At dawn and nightly he left and came back to sleep again. Nightly I crushed him with my body and drank the fear from his coursing blood, most delicious where it penetrated his heart, for that was the only part of him that could move beneath me. I held him in spells for hours, feeding, and when by the force of his gasping he finally awoke, I fell into the billowy sheets sated and happy.

Soon enough he stopped tasting of salt and water and began to taste of me. Become my own voyeur, as though through a window clouded by his halting breath, I filled myself with his fevered visions of my forearms on his, my thighs clamped about his waist, my ankles woven atop his thighs. I loved him for the perfect taste of predation and gorging that fed into itself endlessly. For his waking habits I called him mine, thinking of how he shrunk into the corners of the bed still alert, drowsy but stubbornly cowering from me. In time he began to avoid his bed entirely, choosing instead to sit in a chair illuminated by candlelight fluttering up the adjacent wall. He took dread into the whole shape of him and I felt it became him, and just as well, for truly, that was what he had become. He cried until he was hoarse. I loved him.

One day he left the house and did not return. They brought him from the river, a deep stone in the bowels of a catfish.

They looked upon him, and as they looked, their arms and heads hung limp, as though they, too, had been caught up in the net and spilled. From the window I imagined the taste of dread everlasting, and then in the starlight I waited, and followed each of them to their beds, and drank.


End file.
